SUMMARYThis paper details the downlink performance analysis of a MIMO (Multi-Input Multi-Output) system that combines adaptive beamforming (ABF) and spatial multiplexing (SM) procedures. The combination of MIMO signal processing with ABF is applied to WiBro (Wireless Broadband), the South Korean orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system that follows the IEEE 802.16e standard. Performance analysis is based on the results of experiments and simulations obtained from a prototype system implementation and fixed-point simulator. Both the prototype experiments and simulations demonstrate that the ABF-MIMO OFDMA system improves the required signal to noise ratio (SNR) over the conventional MIMO OFDMA system by 3 dB (QPSK)/2.5 dB (16-QAM) for the frame error rate of 1% in the WiBro signal environments. From the implementation of the prototype system and its experimental results, we verify the feasibility of the ABF-MIMO technology for realizing a practical WiBro base station. The main goal in developing next-generation wireless communication systems is to increase the link throughput (data rate) and the network capacity. It has been verified that the link throughput is drastically increased when multiple antennas are applied at both the transmitter and receiver side [1][2][3]. Multiple-transmit multiple-receive antenna, i.e. multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques can be divided into two categories: space time coding (STC) [1] and spatial multiplexing (SM) [2,3]. STC improves the performance of the communication system by coding over the different transmitter branches, whereas SM achieves a higher throughput by transmitting independent data streams on the different transmit branches simultaneously and at the same carrier frequency. Since our interests are focused on the increase of throughput, we will express SM scheme as MIMO in this paper.A potential application of MIMO principle is the next-generation wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN). The current WMAN standard IEEE 802.16e [4] is based on orthogonal